


I need to be youthfully felt 'cause, God, I never felt young

by mysteriousnight



Category: The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
Genre: Death, Gen, a bridge and a river, inner thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-15
Updated: 2019-05-15
Packaged: 2020-03-06 02:16:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18841585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mysteriousnight/pseuds/mysteriousnight
Summary: Quentin in his final moments





	I need to be youthfully felt 'cause, God, I never felt young

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Jackie and Wilson by Hozier
> 
> I really don't know why I wrote this, but I did. I was going to write something about Quentin and Shreve, but it ended up as this, so enjoy? I just really love this book and just thinking about Quentin makes me so sad.

The moonlight lit the path before him, tree branches casting menacing shadows upon the ground. Quentin hesitated, a sinking feeling in his chest telling him to not go forward. He stared at the shadows, watching them shiver in the wind.

A cloud moved over the moon. The moonlight disappeared. The darkness persisted. Quentin instantly felt better, as if the shadows themselves were inhibiting him. There are no shadows in the darkness, only light can create them. And there was no light. No light of hope or guidence. Just unrelenting darkness covering every inch of his body.

He moved forward, following the path he knew well enough to walk blindfolded. He could hear the night move around him; far away shouts of laughter, from people whose lives were worth living. Quentin stopped again, hearing a bird fly past. As the silence regained its hold on the night, Quentin shivered, suddenly aware of his isolation.

No one was around, no one to save him, or stop him, or witness him. His mind did not wander towards the South, the hell hole he called a home. There was no honeysuckle here, no haunting memories of past mistakes, no reminders of his failures. His past could mean nothing here, yet he could not drop it. He could no better stop time then erase his past. It strangled him, watching him choke, struggling to breath against the suffocating memories of ….

He could hear the water now, his body guiding him blindly towards the sound. From the moment his final bell struck he had felt the water flowing through his veins, pulling him towards its welcoming embrace.

It was a fitting way to go, drowning. No blood, no pain, no chance he could survive. The water welcomed him, it always had. The steam that ran by his house always held him in it's comforting embrace, water flowing past him, through him, as he played with his siblings.

Siblings. His siblings. One. Two. Three. Jason. Benjy. Caddy. _Caddy. **Caddy.**_

The bridge was in front of him, its dark outline defined faintly in the night. The moon had stayed hidden; a single cloud hid the world from his dreadful acts. No one could save him anymore. The world had abandoned him, or rather, he had abandoned the world.

He stood on the bridge, the stone solid underneath his shoes. The air was cold, but Quentin ignored it. It wouldn’t bother him soon enough. All he had to do was jump to get rid of the cold. Simple as that. Simple.

His pockets were heavy, weighed down with weights. Could have just as well been his sins. The thought stung Quentin, shaking him to his core. He had committed the ultimate sin, the sin that would damn both him and Caddy to hell. Caddy.

His lies rattled in his mind, repeating what he had told his father. I have committed incest, father. The lie rung like a bell, repeating, reminding, reliving. His past held his sins, sins he could not escape, sins not even his own. Caddy’s sins. Caddy’s blackguards. Caddy’s Caddy’s Caddy’s _Caddy’s._

He stood on the precipice of his life, wishing some great revelation would unveil itself to him, but he was met with darkness. His life did not flash before his eyes, and for that he was thankful. His life was filled with him reliving his past, death need not repeat it. Instead, the black waters rushed underneath him, deafening him to all other sounds. The bell must have rung for midnight by now, but that did not matter to him. Time was unimportant, for his had run out. The life before him was timeless, a dark void that was not constrained and controlled by the passage of time. It could have been a second or an hour Quentin had stood on that bridge, it would not matter. It all ended the same: dead and cold in the water.

The scent of honeysuckle hit is nose. A phantom smell, a ghost appearing to guide him towards the end. It did not suffocate him, not like it had that night. Now, it was a welcoming spirit of his past, greeting him at the end of all things. It smelled of Caddy. Caddy, the girl who had destined him for death. The girl who had loved him, and he had loved as well, but not enough. He could not love her more than Death, or the sweet embrace that Death offered. The comfort of her cold, dead arms. Nothing could beat that, and Caddy knew, and she had not minded. She had lead him towards his death, and he had not minded. Her impurity sentenced him, allowed him to turn towards his final love.

Death, whose embrace had called him for years.

Death, whose callings had strengthen as the years went by, the responsibilities growing. He could not fail his family, his father, his sister, yet Death called him. Yearned for him to stop trying, to give up the fight and welcome her.

Death, whose ugly face was still hidden from Quentin, and would not be revealed until it was too late for him to remember that Death was not his lover, but his executioner. He would not see her fangs until she had devoured him, nor her claws until his heart was ripped to shreds.

Death is a monster he can not see until water clouds his vision. Until he can see clearly in the last fleeting moments of his life. A monster than lured him to fail, to abandon his life until she consumed his life. Until Death had destroyed Caddy’s image, until Caddy signed his life over to Death.

He looked into the invisible water, into the darkness that confronted him. His mind was silent. No more memories, no more sister, no more father. He was alone, in body and spirit. Nothing awaited him except Death, her arms open, welcoming him home.

Temporary. The word echoed in his mind. It was a sad word, the saddest of all time, of all life. It reminded him of the mortality of life, the fleeting soul that would in no way impact the world at large. He was temporary. His lies were temporary. His time was temporary. Temporary life leads to eternal death. Death did not have the word temporary in her vocabulary, for there is no end to the end. The darkness will go on forever, the pain everlasting, the sleep immortal.

The water met his face suddenly, not as a splash by as a hug, like arms wrapping around a long lost friend. He was home. Home. A home that was not the rotten, decaying house that stood all alone next to a golf course. Next to his pasture. Benjy’s pasture. The pasture that was sold to buy his death note, to buy his tomb, to buy his burial grounds. An education and a wedding; a hangman and the bounty hunter; a guillotine and the blade; a river and some weights.

Water filled his body, washing clean the sin that had built up. He was cleansed as Death appeared, baring her fangs, offering him her claw. He accepted, for he was blinded to Death’s horrors, focusing on the painless sleep that she brought instead.

He floated away with her, his temporary life drowning under the weight of the water, suffocating him in its tender embrace. His time had ran out; his temporary stay in the world was over. Death and her eternal kingdom awaited him now.

He embraced his love, finally.


End file.
